News and changes – and opportunities for you!

February 3, 2013

After a few weeks of fighting one of the many winter bugs going around, I’m happy to finally have had the opportunity to put the 2012 issues into the mail as of this afternoon. If you’ve been waiting patiently for you contributor copy, it should be arriving soon, and I thank you for your patience.

In fact, I thank all of you for your patience in our slower-than-usual response times in updates, email, and submissions. This has been an especially busy year for Paper Nautilus: we held our first chapbook contest, which went very well, and are putting the finishing touches on The Rules of Night Migration, by our winner, Pamela Gross, and we expect to release it sometime in March. Also, if you’re a fan of Paper Nautilus on Facebook, we’ll be posting an opportunity for a pre-sale special for Pam’s upcoming book at a reduced cost, so please check there often if you’re interested!

We also added Joey Gould to our staff as Assistant Poetry Editor this year, and we participated in an event with Submission Bombers, whose mission is to help create additional opportunities for marginalized writers and help make sure their voices are heard; in essence, we were flooded with many lovely submissions from a broad range of talented people for our next issue, and we are thrilled to have been able to support their important work.

AND, while I was pulling the data from the submissions manager to find contributor addresses, I found that in the past two years, we have had almost 1000 different submitters; of these, we have 49 different states, six provinces of Canada, and 22 (!!!) other countries represented. We have read through well over 3000 individual works submitted to us (take note, Alexandra Petri) and couldn’t be more pleased with how far away in the world our little publication has made its presence known – emphasis on “little.”

Paper Nautilus was launched two years ago this month, and – after much networking and promoting and planning – has grown to the scale it is today. In order to manage this volume, I’ll need to make some changes. While Joey was a great help this issue, and I’m thrilled he’ll be staying to help with poetry again for the next issue, I’d love to have an additional reader or two, ideally one each for fiction and poetry. You don’t have to live in the New England area, and you don’t have to contribute more than you want to. This is a volunteer opportunity, so sadly, I can’t pay you, but it’s a great experience if you’ve never worked on a literary publication before, or if you have and are looking to return to it. Also, if you are a student, or are serious about writing and looking to make it part of your career, it’s a great thing to have on a resume. If you or someone you know is interested, please contact us at paper.nautilus@mail.com

On a similar note, depending on the pacing of things, we may begin to close submissions mid-May, and re-open them in August/September. It is always exciting to have a high volume of work coming in, but it truly breaks my heart to turn away good work simply because we don’t have the space. I’m hoping that a smaller submission window will curb that just enough so there’s nothing rejected on the pure fact that we’ve run out of room. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on that.